Instant Community
When I was researching which play structure to put in my backyard, I saw the
Sunray Playground 2005 on display at
Costco. It looked like it had everything I wanted for my boys: a clubhouse, swings, a slide, and a climbing wall. When I got home, I did what everybody does now, I opened Google and started searching for information on the product. Everything that I found, except for one review on Epinions.com for last year's model, was sites for companies selling the product. I found the Sunray site on the internet and read all that I could, including the PDF of the instruction manual. I contacted their technical support to answer some questions that the single review raised about predrilling holes and the time that it would take to build it. Based on this limited information, I purchased the playground.
When I started building the playground, I wanted to document my process so that I could tell others about it. At the beginning of each step, I took a digital photo from the same location. The building went fine. At the end of the first weekend, posted
this webpage, turning the photos into an
animated GIF image using
Animation Shop.
A few days later, I did a Google search for
"Sunray Playground" and found that that page was ranked second after the site for Costco.
Then the questions started:
People with the same questions, were doing the same thing that I did:
- See the playground at Costco
- Google "Sunray Playground"
But now they found my web page.
Based on the information that I put there, someone did something that I did not expect, he posted a question in the
forums on my website. Then another one found it, and another, and another. Within two weeks, my site
charette.com was the top rank for the Google search for "Sunray Playground". People from all over were posting questions, comments, and answers about the playground.
In two weeks, I built a community, not based on geography but a very specific subject.
That's amazing!
